Coming Home to Roost: Bird Flu, a Virus of Our Own Hatching




Dead bird with others
©2004 Compassion Over Killing

By Michael Greger, M.D.

The deadliest plague in human history was the influenza pandemic of 1918, which killed up to 100 million people around the world. Annual flu strains tend to spare young healthy adults, but every few decades a strain arises that can kill people in the prime of life. In 1918, more than a quarter of all Americans fell ill. What started for millions around the globe as a runny nose and a sore throat ended days later with people often bleeding from their ears and nostrils and into their lungs. Many victims drowned in their own blood. Their corpses—tinged blue from suffocation—were said to have been "stacked like cordwood" outside the morgues as cities ran out of coffins. No war, no plague, no famine has ever killed so many in so short a time as the 1918 pandemic.

Where did this disease come from? Just this year, brilliant medical detective work, which included digging up corpses discovered frozen in the Alaskan permafrost for tissue samples, recently pieced together the genetic makeup of the virus. The disease came from straight from bird flu.

Watch our slideshow on Factory Farming.
Factory Farming and Bird Flu

Over the last few decades, meat and egg consumption has exploded in the developing world, leading to industrial-scale commercial chicken farming and mass animal transport, creating the "perfect storm" environment for the emergence of new superstrains of influenza. Though the 1918 virus managed to kill more people in 25 weeks than AIDS has killed in 25 years, it killed less than 3% of those infected. The current mutant H5N1 bird flu virus strain is unprecedented in its ferocity, officially killing more than 50% of its human victims.
etc
 http://www.hsus.org/farm_animals/factory_farms/bird_flu_coming_home_to_roost.html?print=t

Michael Greger said the same thing about SARS, and he is right. Long term intensive farming techniques with large numbers of people, pigs and fowl mean that China especially was the traditional source of many of the viruses that cause human epidemics. This was the case long before air-travel or the globalisation of the poultry trade, but once a virus becomes epidemic in humans then this simply speeds the process. However, as intensive farming spreads globally so does the risk of infectation from reservoir populations of as yet unencountered viruses.

Ignoring moral and personal health issues, eating meat isn't just agriculturally unsustainable it is also becoming an indirect threat to our species. Smoking in public places is banned due to the damage caused by secondary smoke. The same argument could be applied to banning meat as you don't have to eat meat to catch bird flu caused by meat-eaters dirty habits.

"It is becoming clear that the majority of emerging infectious diseases can be attributed to human activities that impact natural ecosystems," said Jonathan Epstein, a veterinarian and wildlife epidemiologist at the Wildlife Trusts Consortium for Conservation Medicine in Palisades, New York. "There are so many potentially dangerous pathogens in wildlife that we don't yet know about, and we need to consider this whenever we expand human settlement into pristine habitat, or move wildlife around the world as part of our global trade."

it appears that you agree with Global research.ca when it suits you
when articles have appeared challenging the official 911 story
you have leapt to a conclusion of whacko conspiracy site


so anyone got any proof that Avian flu / Sars is actually a de facto disease???

because from where i am viewing this all from

all i see is an engineered mandate to
closedown all self sustainable
ancient / tribal lifestyles that rely on home grown
DIY home farming culture

as part of an ongoing 'globalisation' agenda

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There have been many suggestions: stealth viruses that could be introduced covertly into the genomes of a given population, and then triggered later by a signal, designer diseases, and bio-warfare agents in agriculture such as the Fusarium used against drug plantations in Colombia and elsewhere.

The human genome sequence is well on its way to completion. There could be misuse of large scale databases containing information on specific populations, such as the human DNA BioBank planned in Britain, similar to ones in Iceland, Tonga and Sweden. And DNA collections of indigenous peoples have been accumulating in university laboratories under the disreputable Human Genome Diversity Project.

Specific genetic variants of receptors for regulatory and signaling molecules could be targeted. There is also increasing potential for manipulating the immune system, already being done in the course of seemingly innocent research on viruses.

"GM experiments are in some respects worse than biological weapons. For every biological warfare agent, it is possible to know its biological origin, its mode of action, where it is produced and where it is released, providing the BWC Protocol can be agreed. But in the case of accidental creation of deadly pathogens in GM experiments, or contamination with GM microorganisms, none of these parameters is known, and in most cases cannot even be predicted. In the event of disease outbreaks, diagnosis will be delayed, and more people will get ill and die."


 http://biotech.indymedia.org/or/2003/08/1875.shtml
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pollution

viral/ GM/ Electromagnetic/ Depleted Uranium [effects of war]

the combined effects?

a managed disease ?


more here
 http://www.declarepeace.org.uk/captain/murder_inc/site/avian.html

and here

 http://www.declarepeace.org.uk/captain/murder_inc/site/flutruth.html

>hmm...it appears that you agree with Global research.ca when it suits you
>when articles have appeared challenging the official 911 story
>you have leapt to a conclusion of whacko conspiracy site

Since I've obviously got nothing better to do tonight again I'll assume you are talking to me, since that description fits me loosely, although you are more likely talking to Brian as it was his link. Personally, I wouldn't want to link to globalresearch as I suspect they are a LaRouche cult front (ie a CIA Black Op) although I doubt you do from your wording. I have no proof of that though so I'm not going to argue it, I just prefer if people have to link to a page to prove a point, that they link to the most credible page. Global Research is borderline imao.

>so anyone got any proof that Avian flu / Sars is actually a de facto disease???

Diseases, plural. The WHO do. Lots of doctors do. I have more proof that these are diseases than I have that man landed on the moon but I don't find it useful to question the moon landings on a regular basis. I went to Califonia when I was 17 but I couldn't prove to you that it exists if you were determined not to believe in it.

>because from where i am viewing this all from
>all i see is an engineered mandate to
>closedown all self sustainable
>ancient / tribal lifestyles that rely on home grown
>DIY home farming culture
>as part of an ongoing 'globalisation' agenda

Do you see dead people too ?
All I see is an excellent opportunity to point out that the intensive cultivation of meat and the globalisation of the meat trade inevitably leads to new pathogens crossing the species barrier and inevitably one day killing off humanity. The opportunity to promote vegetarianism ( and environmentalism ) not simply for moral reasons the individuals health but for the survival of our species, the opportunity to promote a lifestyle that can survive the end of oil. Sure, poor rural peasants and indigenous peoples suffer most from the culls, but they also suffer equally from pandemics and there were three flu pandemics last century. Poor rural peasants and indigenous peoples suffer the most period.

Do you believe in flu ?

CW
You will find that the origin of the article is GRAIN.ORG, whcih puts the blame on FACTORY FARMING.

Here is the originla article:

'owl play: The poultry industry's central role in the bird flu crisis

GRAIN | February 2006

Read the press release (Feb 2006)

Read GRAINs letter about bird flu to the FAO (Feb 2006)

Backyard or free-range poultry are not fuelling the current wave of bird flu outbreaks stalking large parts of the world. The deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu is essentially a problem of industrial poultry practices. Its epicentre is the factory farms of China and Southeast Asia and -- while wild birds can carry the disease, at least for short distances -- its main vector is the highly self-regulated transnational poultry industry, which sends the products and waste of its farms around the world through a multitude of channels. Yet small poultry farmers and the poultry biodiversity and local food security that they sustain are suffering badly from the fall-out. To make matters worse, governments and international agencies, following mistaken assumptions about how the disease spreads and amplifies, are pursuing measures to force poultry indoors and further industrialise the poultry sector. In practice, this means the end of the small-scale poultry farming that provides food and livelihoods to hundreds of millions of families across the world. This paper presents a fresh perspective on the bird flu story that challenges current assumptions and puts the focus back where it should be: on the transnational poultry industry. '
 http://www.grain.org/briefings/?id=194

And i must remind you Global Reaseach is the site of canadian economist and activist Prof Michael Chossudovsky, and is definitely NOT linked to Larouche! Its a vey good site and i surf it often.
Brian

>And i must remind you Global Reaseach is the site of canadian economist and activist Prof Michael Chossudovsky, and is definitely NOT linked to Larouche!

Definitely ? Okay, you do seem definite. They do have a couple of non-complimentary references to Larouche, but other Larouche fronts have previously tried that for cover. I am perhaps overly suspicious, I saw a few tid-bits of obviously leaked information appearing on GR at the same time as Larouche fronts published them, it could well have been coincidence.

>Its a vey good site and i surf it often.

It is and so do I.
I am overly paranoid perhaps in this regard, I've had dealings so I have cause to be a bit para, but they do have contacts , agents, resources and enough saps on their books. If you doubt that then do a search even here on Indymedia for LaRouche -
 http://www.google.co.uk/search?as_q=&num=10&hl=en&btnG=Google+Search&as_epq=larouche&as_sitesearch=indymedia.org

Danny
Ironically, your link shows me that Larouche has connections with Indymedia!!!!!!!!

But this is all irrelevant. I also read La Rouche. la Rouche is not a problem. I go where the info is. I have no use for this stigmatising of a sourec, unless its something like the necon Weekly Standard, which in the past has praised the bombing of Hanoi:

'As a snobbish Harvard conservative in 1972, young William Kristol praised Richard Nixon's Christmas B-52 bombing raids over Hanoi as "one of the great moments in American history". He never had second thoughts, and today is regarded as the foremost promoter of the Iraqi war. His magazine, The Weekly Standard, funded by Rupert Murdoch, is described by the New York Times as, "Reader for reader, it may be the most influential publication in America".
 http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=3349

>Ironically, your link shows me that Larouche has connections with Indymedia!!!!!!!!

I was being serious not ironic. The Larouche cult does target the sort of folk who read here, and so they often post here, I wanted to point that out. Advertising is obvious to every intelligent person but advertising still works.

>I have no use for this stigmatising of a sourec, unless its something like the...

Me too. I ignore any site that happily posts fascist, racist or cultist propaganda. You quote ZMag on IM so you almost certainly don't need my advice on this subject - but many kids do. Consider this Chomsky quote a public service announcement like 'Don't drink and drive' :



DB: David Frum just can't stop lavishing praise upon you. He says, "Your views are exactly like the stuff peddled by Lyndon LaRouche and the Christic Institute." You had an incident involving the Larouchies that you've mentioned in several talks.

(Chomsky) It went as far as death threats. I had been following them pretty closely, partly because I knew some of the kids involved. They were children of personal friends. It grew out of the Columbia strike in 1968. Originally it was the National Caucus of Labor Committees. It was a Marxist group of serious young people who were going to live in working-class areas and organize people. You could like it or dislike it. It was perfectly rational. This guy Lyndon LaRouche, who had some other name then, was the guru. At first he looked like some sort of standard ex-Trotskyite. After a while you could see what was happening. These are hard things to do. You're giving up your life, your career, the only world you live in is your surroundings. He gradually began to introduce slightly crazy themes into the ideology. You could see him do it little by little. At each point everyone in the group, nineteen-year-old kids, had to make a decision: Am I going to go along with this or am I going to give up my life? A lot of people went along. After a while they were off in outer space. The positions were so insane you couldn't even talk about it.

They then got quite violent. They started something called Operation Mop-Up. They were going to take the hegemony of the left by going into some movement meeting with baseball bats and beating everyone over the head. At first nobody knew what to do about it. After a while they figured, OK, we'll come back with bigger baseball bats. The next thing they started was what amounted to an extortion racket against parents. A lot of the kids had middle-class parents. The idea was to go back to your parents and tell them that unless they sold the store and gave it to LaRouche, they were enemies of the human race, objective fascists, and you were never going to have anything to do with them again.

This went on for a while. I started getting approached at talks I was giving. Some old couple would come up. I remember once a couple came up, a guy who had a little grocery store somewhere. He told me this was what his kids were saying, what did I think he ought to do? Usually I didn't answer. This once I said, if you want me to tell you the truth, I'll tell you the truth. I told him what I thought. About a week later I got a message signed Labor Committee Intelligence Service: our Intelligence Service has learned that you're spreading rumors about the party. You have one week to clear yourself of these charges. I threw it into the waste basket. Shortly after their newspaper started coming out with crazed attacks. The funniest one was a pamphlet they put out for the Bicentennial, July 4, 1976. It was called "Terrorist Commanders." It had on the front a picture of me and Marc Raskin. It was quite amusing. It was about how the two of us run the KGB and the CIA and the PLO and the Queen of England and whoever else was in their conspiracy at the time. They said we were planning to put atom bombs in major U.S. cities at the time of the Bicentennial. I got it in August, a month after. Usually these end-of-the-world people, when it doesn't happen they have some reason. But they were still predicting it a month after it didn't happen. That was put on the windshield of my car with a death threat scribbled on it. I won't go into the details of what happened next. I didn't hear from them for a while. Since then it's similar things.